Damian said

I have used gentoo linux's 'emerge' (portage), and apt-get of debian linux. Is this some kind of
'open' package repository-system? Or limited to freebsd-only? Please advice.

Jonathan said

Gentoo's system was based off of this. Unless you're using precompiled ports they are scripts that
grab the files (makedepends etc) and then compiles.
You just have to go to a port and
make install clean
Presto! installed. (after menus or w/e ofc)

Coder of Salvation said

wow this sounds great! but what exactly are the requirements to run this? I downloaded the big
tarball @ www.freebsd.org/ports/installing.html but when I run make it breaks on '.include' &
'.if' statements in the Makefile (ps. gentoo/GNU make v3.82)

Jonathan said

I'm fairly sure it would only work on freebsd.

cmdrk said

Yeah, FreeBSD's ports system only works on FreeBSD. A lot of programs contain some FreeBSD specific
packages.
There are other tools like portmaster and portupgrade that simplify installing ports. Maybe I'll
show those off some time :)

rlinnemann said

Also note that the FreeBSD ports system is entirely wound on BSD makefiles. GNU make will not grok
them well.